Effort
on to Protect Nation's Power Grid

Aug 17, 2005 Jim Paul euractive.com

URBANA,
Ill. (AP) - Researchers armed with $7.5 million from
the federal government are setting out to develop
a computer network that can improve the reliability
of the nation's vulnerable power grid and make it
secure from attack.

The
project follows the largest blackout in U.S. history,
which left millions of people in the Northeast and
southern Canada without power in August 2003.

"Although
the blackout was accidental, it showed that current
controls and computer software are inadequate," said
William H. Sanders, director of the university's Information
Trust Institute. "Today, people are trying to patch
it. But those patches will not get us to where we
need to be."

Researchers
from the University of Illinois, Cornell University,
Dartmouth College and Washington State University
will join with electricity companies to focus over
the next five years on developing controls and sensors
for the network, protocol for sharing information
and technology for keeping the information trustworthy
and secure.

is
a significant national problem," said Carl Landwehr,
director of the National Science Foundation's Cyber
Trust program, which provided the grant.

"I
believe the solutions that will be addressed will
apply not only to the power grid but to the entire
problem of implementing secure computer systems,"
Landwehr said Wednesday.

The
Aug. 14, 2003, blackout was blamed on a tree that
shorted out a power line in Ohio and began a cascade
of failure in a distribution system that had been
assembled piece by piece over decades. After the blackout,
President Bush called the system "antiquated."